Medusa attacks Henry County

Incident Date: Mar 21, 2024

Attack Overview
VICTIM
Henry County
INDUSTRY
Government
LOCATION
USA
ATTACKER
Medusa
FIRST REPORTED
March 21, 2024

Henry County Hit by Medusa Ransomware Attack

Henry County in Illinois has been attacked by the Medusa ransomware group. The county’s leadership was alerted to the attack and shut down access to multiple impacted systems. The county is still able to receive 911 calls and dispatch emergency services despite the attack. Medusa gave the county eight days to pay a $500,000 ransom. Henry County is an Illinois county government on the border with Iowa. Its population is 49,284, and its county seat is Cambridge.

About Medusa Ransomware

Medusa is a RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) that made its debut in the summer of 2021 and has evolved to be one of the more active RaaS platforms. Attack volumes were inconsistent in the first half of 2023, with a resurgence of attack activity in the last half of 2023. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software as well preventing recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting VSS Shadow Copies to thwart encryption rollback.

Medusa ramped up attacks in the latter part of 2022 and has been one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023 but appears to have waned somewhat in the second quarter. Medusa typically demands ransoms in the millions of dollars, which can vary depending on the target organization’s ability to pay.

How Medusa Operates

The Medusa RaaS operation (not to be confused with the operators of the earlier MedusaLocker ransomware) typically compromises victim networks through malicious email attachments (macros), torrent websites, or through malicious ad libraries. Medusa can terminate over 280 Windows services and processes without command line arguments (there may be a Linux version as well, but it is unclear at this time.)

Medusa targets multiple industry verticals, especially healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and public sector organizations too. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption, but they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.

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